Mark Steyn on our war, four years on.

Mr. Steyn gets it. The sad fact is there is no will to fight a war against the goat molesters who hope for six dozen virgins in the afterlife. Those guys are motivated to kill themselves. It seems there is no truth to that time honored chestnut "Once you go goat, you never go back."

The "war on terror" label has outlived whatever usefulness it had. And, as the years go by, it becomes clearer the war aspects -- the attacks in New York, Washington, Bali, Madrid, Istanbul, London -- are really spasmodic flashes of a much more elusive enemy. Though Islamism is the first truly global terrorist insurgency, it shares more similarities with conventional terrorist movements -- the Irish Republican Army or the Basque separatists -- than many of us thought four years ago. Terrorist groups persist because their targets lack confidence: The IRA, for example, calculated correctly the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew they could never win militarily but they also could never be defeated. That's what the Islamists have bet.

Only a tiny minority of Muslims want to be suicide bombers and only a slightly larger minority want actively to provide support networks for suicide bombers. But big majorities of Muslims support almost all the terrorists' strategic goals.

For example, a recent poll found more than 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia in the United Kingdom. That's a "moderate" westernized Muslim: He wants stoning for adultery in Liverpool, but he's a "moderate" because it's not such a priority he's prepared to fly a plane into a skyscraper.

As with IRA killers and the broader Irish nationalist population, these shared aims provide a large comfort zone in which terror networks can operate. And it enables the nonviolent lobby groups to use the terrorists -- or the threat of terrorists -- as part of a good cop/bad cop routine.

Thus, the Islamic lobby groups pressure governments to make concessions to them rather than to the terrorists, though both elements have the same aims. You can pluck out news items at random: In London, a religious "hate crimes" law that makes honest discussion of Islam even more difficult; in Ontario, Canada, the moves toward sharia courts for Muslim community disputes; in Seattle, introduction of separate-sexes Muslim-only swimming sessions in municipal pools. The September 11 terrorists were in favor of all these things.

So four years on we're winning in the Middle East and Central Asia but floundering in Europe and North America. War is hell, but a war that half the country refuses to recognize as such staggers on as a very contemporary kind of purgatory.